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The Diamond Age is also pretty fucking good. In no particular order here's a small list of stuff I thought was cool:

Lexicon by Max Barry - Lexicographers use phonemes to hack mental states.

The Islanders by Christopher Priest - Guide to an archipelago of islands situated in a temporal anomaly; the plot is just bizarre and scattered throughout each entry.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys - Experiment turns mentally challenged guy into genius, he reverts back again, follows his experience via diary entries, depressing.

Gateway by Frederick Pohl - Humans find abandoned alien space station filled with spaceships they're unable to control, or even understand. Prospectors pick ships to ride, sometimes coming back with treasures, sometimes coming back dead.

Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers - Classic, similar to Gateway, some kind of ephemeral, eldritch intelligence (maybe?) visits Earth, leaves behind objects and phenomena beyond human comprehension.

Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding - Steampunk airship pirates meets Fullmetal Alchemist.

Right, first let's clarify the construction of the harmonies. The chord names are usually pretty straightforward and refer to the degrees of the scale on which they are built. You’ll love that.

C6/9 - C,E,G,A,D

A C major scale, as you know, is built like this: 1.C, 2.D, 3.E, 4.F, 5.G, 6.A, 7.B, 8.C.

So, C6/9 requires a C major triad, the sixth note of the major scale and the ninth, which is an octave and a tone above the root. D in C major.

C13 - C,E,G,Bb,D,F,A

A 13th chord is the triad, the dominant 7th (generally known in contemporary musical practice as the seventh, the major seventh is the natural seventh of the major scale), the ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth. You could spell this as C7/4/6/9, but that’s a fucking mess, so we use 13 as a shorthand. 9ths,11ths and 13ths can all come in major, minor and ready salted varieties. They all assume the inclusion of the 7th and, as you get higher up, the 9th and 11th degrees. Just so you know, the major version is C,E,G,B,D,F,A, the minor, C,Eb,G,Bb,D,F,A and the other I’ve mentioned. You’re going to hate the reason Bb is used in the Cmin7, so I’ll save it for later.

FMaj9#11 - F,A,C,E,D,B

It’s a major 9th chord, so you need the 7th degree of the F major scale, the 9th note (or the 2nd) and the sharpened 11th note, which (for those who can only count to 8) is the 4th.

Bb11 - Bb,D,F,Ab,C,Eb

You get the idea by now.

That’s the chord sequence. I also mentioned:

Gm9 - G,Bb,D,F,A

Fm13/Bb - F,Ab,C,Eb,G,Bb,D

Right, we’ve got some minor chords here. Whether you like it or not, in jazz harmony (prevalent in popular music and the kind nearly everyone does on this site without knowing it) a minor chord has nothing to do with the melodic / harmonic minor scales of fucking Bach’s wet dreams. I actually don’t know why there was a change in harmonic nonclemature mid 20th century, but anyway, they’re built around the dorian. Cm7 is C,Eb,G,Ab and the scale you’d use to jam over this would be a C dorian, C,D,Eb,F,G,A,Bb (or might use, there's cooler changes over this). If you wanted to rip some sick licks using a 1790 vintage C minor scale you’d be rocking to something like Cm9#5.

Flats are generally preferred over sharps in jazz for whatever reason, but here I’ve used flats here for a very specific reason; they’re enharmonically correct. This is a bitch to explain succinctly, but the simplest way of looking at it is, in F major, if I used an A# instead of a Bb, I’d be using A twice in the same scale. Wiki it.

Also, saying you don’t need to learn flats because you use trackers is shooting yourself in the foot. You’re a slave to whoever designed the interface. If you’re an LSDJ user, you’re just Johan Kotlinski’s music bitch. You won’t be able to apply your musical knowledge beyond the tracker interface you’re most used to. Nearly all trackers I’ve used are constructed to adhere to the typical, western musical practice, but make concessions based on UI, memory, cycle usage and screen real-estate.

Here’s the best bit. If you called me out, told me I was wrong and said you were using classical musical counterpoint, you’d be completely right. Most of this wouldn’t really apply. I’d argue you could easily analyse ye old concerto using the common theoretical practice, but I would also totally agree with you.

The final thing I’d like to add. I fucking hate it when someone pulls the authority card due to their perceived superiority on the subject, but I'm doing a PhD in composition. I know what the general academic understanding of music theory is because I have to talk about it in front of judgemental people. You’ve also got FearOfDark who just graduated (with a first class degree) in music from a fantastic UK university and I'd imagine quite a few others here with academic musical backgrounds. Listen to them. It’s not everywhere on the Internet you can learn directly from people who actually know what they’re talking about. Music theory is fucking stupid; steeped in nonsense tradition, dated terminology and nonsensical practice, you should definitely call it out, but militantly defending your ignorance (and attacking others) through lack of contextual understanding is counter-productive. What’s with the point scoring, man?

I haven’t really answered your question, but seriously, there’s a year’s worth of lectures in this. You need to better understand the relationship between chords and scales. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation; chords are built on scales, but scales are built on chords. There are lots of people more capable than I of describing this, and will give you a non-jazz spin on music theory.

EDIT - Ah, Maxdolensky already articulated this better.

Dude, key =/= scale.

Okay, so the passage: C6/9 | C13 | Fmaj9#11 | Bb11 || is emphatically in C major, however requires a few different scales.

C6/9: C major, C lydian (<-- this'll sound cool), or C major pent, whichever you want.

C13: C mixolydian / G dorian (you can treat this as a Gmin7).

Fmaj9#11: F lydian / F major pent.

Bb11: F dorian / F minor pent / Bb lydian (Bb11 is performing the role of an Fm13/Bb).

You can use other scales here (to better effect), it's an example.

Just because the scale changes, it doesn’t mean the key has shifted. All keys are exactly the same, it’s the intervals between them (and respective harmonic modulations) that matter.

Now, my other point, you've probably noticed F lydian uses the same notes as C Ionian (Major). There's no real difference between a funk jam in Dm (D dorian) and a pop track in C (C ionian) as both are built on the same scale. It's where you start, the underlying harmonics and melodic emphases that dictate the scale's relationship to the key.

tldr Using C major doesn't reflect on a composer's skill whatsoever.

I like C major. It's a good key.

wow, amazing

Just started a PhD exploring idiosyncratic chipmusic compositional techniques. I say this as it might be pretty cool to get some community input at some point.